In the early 1920s, Raoul Hausmann delved into a new speculative artistic project he dubbed “optophonetics,” whose technical apparatus was the never-invented optophone. The project involved the ambition to elaborate on the biological and physiological aspects of class struggle—an ambition that necessitated an alter-epistemological theory of the revolution. This “artistic research” was embedded not only within an unrealized technical apparatus, a sort of “organic thinking” haunted by a future “biotechnical” organism; it also involved an unusual alignment with the popular pseudoscientific community connected with Hanns Hörbiger’s “World Ice Theory” (Welteislehre). Here, Hausmann came to see himself as a “dilettante,” a figure epitomizing the contested epistemic field of an artist who had initiated a radical practice of the deskilling of his art.
The figure of the living corpse stands at the center of Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the Nazi concentration camps. This article uncovers how Arendt’s understanding of living death was indebted to her reading and translations of David Rousset’s Les jours de notre mort (1947). Positioning Arendt as a secondary witness who sought to mediate survivor testimony to the unscathed, it shows how Rousset’s book was central to Arendt’s effort to inspire a fearful anticipation of totalitarianism in readers who could not imagine the horrors of the camps. At the same time, Arendt’s controversial claims about the passivity of Holocaust victims were derived from Rousset, with the image of the camp inmate as a marionette emerging, via the German Puppe, as a translation of Rousset’s term mannequin. In translating Rousset, Arendt was torn between her ethical obligations to the victims and her political responsibilities to the postwar world.
The 1970s were a time of political revolt and state entrenchment in West Germany, during which the police implemented an intrusive surveillance apparatus that, for the first time, capitalized on digital technology. Volker Schlöndorff and Margarethe von Trotta’s film The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum) (1975) is one of the best-known works that delves into police manhunts. While scholars have attended to the issue of police surveillance, this article is the first to explore the film in the context of the emerging digital technology. Focusing on grid structures as a medium of control, the essay uses material from the German Federal Archives in Koblenz to show how the cinematic work negotiates the dawn of a new digital era that eventually led to today’s mass surveillance.
A conspiracy theory surrounding the Frankfurt School has entered the mainstream. Popular in conservative media and even the current White House, the theory holds that the thinkers of the Frankfurt School are to blame for the rise of political correctness and identity politics, political polarization, and the disintegration of the so-called American way of life. The longer history of the conspiracy theory has four distinct phases, which start in conspiracy theorizing on the American left in the 1970s and run up to the contemporary culture wars. However, the conspiracy theory often gets caught up in and refracts elements of critical theory, such as its concern with the effects of mass media and critique of the corporate appropriation of culture. In this curious mirroring, the conspiracy theory forces an examination of the relationship between mimesis and critique, which sheds light on not only how the conspiracy theory fits into the dynamics of antisemitism, but also the cultural politics of critique so poignantly formulated by the Frankfurt School.
Max Weber and Oswald Spengler are contrasting figures in German intellectual history: Weber is respected as the inaugurator of “interpretive sociology” and a champion of liberal democracy, whereas Spengler is disparaged as a pseudoscientific dilettante whose authoritarian politics inspired National Socialism. This received dichotomy of “sociology” and “dilettantism,” in large part manufactured by Weber himself, misrepresents the malleable border between literature and science in Weimar Germany and obscures the fact that the first volume of Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) was embraced by much of the German intellectual community for its originality. Spengler’s experimental interpretive paradigm thus frustrated Weber’s efforts to promote a rigorous method for the human sciences and caused Weber to debate Spengler at Munich’s Rathaus in February 1920. A reexamination of this debate within the context of the early reception of Spengler’s work enables an unprejudiced reconsideration of the diverse ambitions for the future of the human sciences that proliferated at the dawn of the Weimar Republic.
